Review | Silent Opera’s immersive opera Vixen without orchestra, chorus or stage brings narrative clarity to Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen
- Silent Opera’s immersive opera replaces colloquial Czech of the Janacek work it’s based on with vernacular English, and makes the original’s story much clearer
- For small-scale opera to work, singers need to make adjustments, and here some did not dial back their voices’ power enough or lend drama to their characters
Silent Opera, founded in 2011 by the London-based stage director Daisy Evans, is an exercise in creative destruction. Take traditional operas, rip away the orchestra, chorus and any superfluous characters – and while we’re at it, the stage – and what do you have left?
In the case of Vixen, a 70-minute immersive presentation at Tai Kwun’s Prison Yard and Laundry Steps as part of this year’s Hong Kong Arts Festival, you have an engaging, challenging and often frustrating argument over the relevance of the art form itself.
Much of this stems from the source material. Drawing on an illustrated novel originally serialised in a Czech daily newspaper, Leos Janacek fashioned tales of a cunning (or “sharp-eared”) fox and her dealings with humans and other species into an opera like no other, incorporating Moravian folk music with extended, highly evocative orchestral passages.
Since its premiere a century ago, productions of The Cunning Little Vixen have run the gamut from clever children’s cartoons to highly tragic metaphors for adults.
Silent Opera, to put it mildly, takes the adult route. Reconceived for Tai Kwun by Mark Burns from Evans’ original production, Vixen dispenses with metaphor entirely, the fox now becoming a homeless runaway (dubbed “the girl with the vixen tattoo” in a nod to Stieg Larsson’s bestseller). The forester is now named, well, Forester.
Early 20th-century Czech colloquialisms give way to (often profane) English vernacular from the 21st, localised with liberal references to Hong Kong food and geography.
Before the show, audience members were instructed in using headphones while a quintet of buskers (Ruda Lee, Bob Hui Wing-hang, Lam Ka-ki, Ho Chun-yip, and Jacky Leung) worked the crowd. The evening then unfolded as an arty variation on a silent disco.
The buskers became a strolling pit band, their playing spun imaginatively into an electroacoustic soundscape designed by Max Peppenhim (and, for this revival, Candog Ha) incorporating local street sounds and recorded orchestral music along with live vocal performances.
This minimalist Vixen wreaks such violence on the original libretto and score that Janacek’s name doesn’t even appear on the title page. And yet, his story takes on a new-found narrative clarity.
The Forester’s wife becomes understandably jealous of the young newcomer. His son’s teasing of the girl turns darkly sexual; Vixen’s ill-fated escape from domestic “safety” becomes a return to the freedom of the streets.
The frustrations came with the actual rendering of the production’s concepts.
The cast, all of a similar age and with similar vocal timbre, often struggled to convey the variety in their characters. Trained to sing many European languages with operatic grandeur, they sometimes strained to render an English text with theatrical immediacy, or dial back the vocal firepower for an audience sitting two metres away.
La Bohème by Opera Hong Kong: a truly superb performance from start to end
In the March 15 performance, Vivian Yau as Vixen best maintained a ferocious intensity even at a controlled volume. Michael Lam as Forester started out well but lost some focus as the evening wore on. Aaron Kwan’s Fox (Vixen’s eventual romantic partner) had even less stamina, while Caleb Woo (with limited stage time as Forester’s friend Harasta) maintained superb control over both text and musical line.
Other cast members Amanda Ng, Ashley Chiu, Michael Yuen and Frankie Fung Yat-hei each played multiple roles, though often without much clear delineation.
Though Kitty Calister’s gritty sets and costumes helped make the dramatic power of small-scale opera clearly apparent, the cast too often gave the impression they were merely singing roles rather than portraying actual people.
True localisation would require a lot more commitment.
“Vixen”, Hong Kong Arts Festival, Tai Kwun. Reviewed: March 15.
